The consumer-driven approach: defining and measuring success

Employers' reluctance to implement consumer-driven health plans (CDHPs) is at least in part due to their not understanding how to define and measure the success of CDHPs. To assist employers, the authors define potential points of success for CDHPs in the areas of consumer engagement, consumer financial considerations and employee health and productivity. They then offer ways of measuring success in those areas, as well as in the area of employer cost control. By taking a carefully considered approach to the decision of whether to offer a CDHP, employers can grasp potential opportunities to control health care costs.     

What have we learned from a decade of empirical research on growth? Comment on "It's Not Factor Accumulation: Stylized Facts and Growth Models," by William Easterly and Ross Levine

William Easterly and Ross Levine document five stylized factsabout growth and argue that they imply a bigger role for totalfactor productivity (TFP) and technology than for physical andhuman capital. I agree with the first four of their facts andbelieve facts 1 and 3 provide strong support for their conclusionthat TFP should be the focus of growth research.     

Welfare rights and wrongs: The limits of local anti-poverty strategies

This article discusses the development of local authority anti-poverty initiatives in Britain over the last two decades, setting them in the context of previous targeted anti-poverty activity in this country and in the United States, and focusing in particular upon the important role played by welfare rights within local anti-poverty work. The article also describes in some detail the initiatives in the welfare rights field undertaken by Sheffield County Council in the 1980s as part of its more general commitment during this period to challenging poverty and deprivation in the city and improving welfare services. It is argued that Sheffield provides an example of many of the strengths, and weaknesses, of the welfare rights theme within local authority anti-poverty action; and that from this lessons can be drawn for the role of welfare rights in future anti-poverty initiatives here and elsewhere. In conclusion the more general limitations of local anti-poverty strategies are discussed, contrasting their tactical successes with their more general policy failure in preventing the growth of local poverty.     

Ecological uncertainty,adaptation, and mitigation in the U.S. ski resort industry: Managing resource dependence and institutional pressures

We draw on resource dependence and institutional theories to study how firms manage uncertainty in nature (ecological uncertainty) in the U.S. ski resort industry. Through resource dependence theory, we develop the concept of ecological uncertainty and explain its effects on firms' access to and management of natural resources. We then predict that firms adapt to ecological uncertainty with natural‐resource‐intensive practices, as well as practices that attempt to mitigate its underlying causes. Using institutional theory, we also predict that environmental expectations moderate these responses. Our results indicate that firms did manage ecological uncertainty by adopting natural‐resource‐intensive practices, but not mitigation practices. They also show that stronger environmental expectations constrained firms from adopting natural‐resource‐intensive practices and promoted their adoption of mitigation practices in response to ecological uncertainty. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

FOR‐PROFIT SEARCH PLATFORMS

We consider optimal pricing by a profit‐maximizing platform running a dynamic search and matching market. Buyers and sellers enter in cohorts over time, meet, and bargain under private information. The optimal centralized mechanism, which involves posting a bid–ask spread, can be decentralized through participation fees charged by the intermediary to both sides. The sum of buyers' and sellers' fees equals the sum of inverse hazard rates of the marginal types, and their ratio equals the ratio of buyers' and sellers' bargaining weights. We also show that a monopolistic intermediary in a search market may be welfare enhancing.